National Gallery of Art - East Building - The Permanent Collection - September 21-22, 2025

Winter Valley - 1944

 

Lamar Dodd

American, 1909 - 1996

 

Never associated with any specific art movement, Lamar Dodd was a southern painter who worked in various styles throughout his long career. This depiction of Athens, where Dodd lived and taught at the University of Georgia, was influenced by the urban realism of the Ashcan school as well as the regionalist movements of the 1930s. In this work Dodd has emphasized the harsher, more urban aspects of Athens, rather than its identity as a genteel southern university town.

 

Winter Valley depicts the eastern part of Athens, where a majority of the city’s African American residents lived close to the industrial plants they staffed. Dodd wrote that the painting’s ominous, brooding quality was inspired by his intensive study of El Greco’s View of Toledo (c. 1597, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The somber tone also echoes the mindset of a nation at war. Dodd felt that it was one of his best works. The art historian Gudmund Vigtel characterized Winter Valley as “a major example of Dodd’s intellectual program as a painter, flavored by his emotional involvement with the subject.”

 

William Lamar Dodd was a painter and university administrator committed to advancing arts education in his home state of Georgia and throughout the South. Dodd was born in Fairburn, Georgia, on September 22, 1909. Dodd’s artistic talent was recognized early, and he began taking art classes at the local college, LaGrange Female College, as early as the sixth grade. After one year at the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a year teaching high school art in Alabama, Dodd moved to New York in 1928 and enrolled in the Art Students League. He studied with George Bridgman and Boardman Robinson and took private classes with George Luks and Charles Martin. Dodd returned to Georgia in 1930 and married Mary Ridley Lehmann the following year. After his first solo exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 1931, Dodd returned to the Art Students League in New York, this time studying with Jean Charlot and John Steuart Curry and working as a sign painter to support his family during the Great Depression. In 1934 Dodd left New York for Birmingham, Alabama, where he worked for several years in an art supply store and painted at night.

 

Dodd gradually rose to prominence during the 1930s by winning several awards in national competitive exhibitions. This increased recognition led to his appointment as artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia in 1937; he became chair of the department the following year. Dodd was an able administrator who, during the course of his nearly 40-year career at the university, transformed the art school into one of the best in the country. The program was officially named the Lamar Dodd School of Art in 1995. By the 1940s Dodd was firmly established as a nationally recognized artist and educator. He was a leading figure in a wide variety of art organizations and later served as a cultural envoy for the Department of State. With a $10,000 grant from the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, Dodd made his first trip to Europe in 1953 and spent six months visiting churches, museums, and sites important to artists he admired. In 1954 he was elected to the first of two terms as president of the College Art Association, becoming the first painter to hold that office. In 1962 he was named chairman of the National Council of the Arts in Education.

 

Dodd continued to paint and exhibited regularly at the Grand Central Moderns gallery in New York, the National Arts Club, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1959 he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design. In 1963 he was one of seven artists invited by NASA to record the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission; some of Dodd’s works for the project were included in the Eyewitness to Space exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 1965. He continued to work as a NASA artist for future missions, including the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

 

In the introduction to Dodd’s 1970 retrospective at the High Museum and the Georgia Museum of Art, Lloyd Goodrich deemed the 25 paintings that resulted from the Apollo 11 project to be Dodd's most original and impressive works.

Never associated with any specific art movement, Dodd was an independent painter who worked in a wide range of styles and subjects. He began his career by painting landscapes and cityscapes of his native Georgia, and progressed to still lifes, seascapes in Monhegan, Maine, and space exploration themes. In the late 1970s, after his wife underwent open-heart surgery, Dodd began studying and observing heart surgeries and completed a series of works in response. Some of his last paintings dealt with the O. J. Simpson trial and the Oklahoma City bombing. Dodd died at his home in Athens on September 21, 1996.

 

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For previous visit in 2024, see:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320706623/

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www.nga.gov/about/welcome-to-the-east-building.html

 

The East Building opened in 1978 in response to the changing needs of the National Gallery, mainly to house a growing collection of modern and contemporary art. The building itself is a modern masterpiece. The site's trapezoidal shape prompted architect I.M. Pei's dramatic approach: two interlocking spaces shaped like triangles provide room for a library, galleries, auditoriums, and administrative offices. Inside the ax-blade-like southwest corner, a colorful, 76-foot-long Alexander Calder mobile dominates the sunlight atrium. Visitors can view a dynamic 500-piece collection of photography, paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and media arts in thought-provoking chronological, thematic, and stylistic arrangements.

 

Highlights include galleries devoted to Mark Rothko's giant, glowing canvases; Barnett Newman's 14 stark black, gray, and white canvas paintings from The Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966; and several colorful and whimsical Alexander Calder mobiles and sculptures. You can't miss Katharina Fritsch's Hahn/Cock, 2013, a tall blue rooster that appears to stand guard over the street and federal buildings from the roof terrace, which also offers views of the Capitol. The upper-level gallery showcases modern art from 1910 to 1980, including masterpieces by Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Sam Gilliam, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Ground-level galleries are devoted to American art from 1900 to 1950, including pieces by George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Alfred Stieglitz. The concourse level is reserved for rotating special exhibitions.

 

The East Building Shop is on the concourse level, and the Terrace Café looks out over the atrium from the upper level.

 

www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/03/national-gallery-...

 

"The structure asks for its visitors to gradually make their way up from the bottom, moving from the Gallery’s earliest acquisitions like the paintings of French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard to its contemporary work, such as Janine Antoni’s much fussed over “Lick and Lather,” a series of busts composed of chocolate and soap. The bottom floors offer a more traditional viewing experience: small taupe-colored rooms leading to more small taupe-colored rooms. As one moves upward, however, the spaces open up, offering more dramatic and artful exhibition rooms. The largest single aspect of the I.M. Pei-designed building’s renovation has been the addition of a roof terrace flanked by a reimagination two of the three original “tower” rooms of Pei’s design.

 

On one side is a space dedicated to sculptor Alexander Calder, with gently spinning mobiles of all shapes and sizes delicately cascading from the ceiling. The subtle movements of the fine wire pieces mimic the effect of a slight breeze through wind chimes—it’s both relaxing and slightly mesmerizing, especially when we’re used to art that stands stock still. Delight is a relatively rare emotion to emerge in a museum, making it all the more compelling.

 

But it’s the tower space on the other side—a divided hexagonal room—that caused several visitors to gasp as I surveyed it. On one side of the division (the room you enter from the roof terrace) hang Barnett Newman’s fourteen “Stations of the Cross,” the human-sized renderings of secular suffering and pain conceived in conversation with the Bible story. Entirely black and white, with just a tinge of red in the final painting, the series wraps around the viewer, fully encapsulating you in the small but meaningful differentiations between paintings. Hung as a series, the paintings gain a narrative they might otherwise have lost.

 

The light edging around either side of the room’s division invite the viewer to move from Newman’s chiaroscuric works, which require you to move from painting to painting searching for the scene in each, to a mirror image of that space covered in Mark Rothko’s giant, glowing canvases, which require the viewer to step back and attempt to take in the sight of so much hazy, vivid color all at once. The dichotomy is stark, and yet the paintings all work together somehow, rather than one set repelling the other.

 

With light filtering through the glass ceiling above, the tower room does feel like a crescendo of sorts, but not in the way many museums’ most famous or valuable pieces often do. The room isn’t dedicated to ensuring that visitors snake their way into the belly of the museum, to first be captured and then let out through the gift shop. Instead, it’s a reminder that in a space dedicated to honoring the modern and the contemporary that the evolution of art remains just as integral as any singular Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol or Donald Judd aluminum box. There’s still a story in abstract art."

 

www.washingtonian.com/2016/09/28/national-gallery-art-eas...

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